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Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

monica-at-mozilla.blogspot.com

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Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#171

Post by mike_hearn »

oconnore wrote: post #155
devsquid wrote: post #133

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealt…

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

Poor people aren't robots. They can and do see adverts for things that they don't then buy.

Additionally ad targeting means they might see adverts for things they could afford and that's t be relevant to their life instead of things meant for rich westerners.

The whole mental confusion between advertising and privacy in the technical and media community is really irritating. What's the alternative to advertising? Direct payments. And how do you do those? Credit cards. And what do credit cards have on them? Your legal name and your physical address. And how do they work? You provide those details to the seller.

Good luck using Tor or even incognito mode on a an without adverts.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#172

Post by throwawayaway »

dangrossman wrote: post #74
throwawayaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google obviously have systems in place to allow employee access for absolute emergencies - but alarmed in case of unauthorised access. in any case, the analytics data is anonymised and as such cannot be used to identify you. google goes to huge lengths anonymising data to aggregate you as a user into groups of millions for advertisers to bid on, you are simply not a big enough fish for special treatment. edit: an exp…

I didn't downvote you, but... > google goes to huge lengths anonymising data to aggregate you as a user into groups of millions for advertisers to bid on, you are simply not a big enough fish for special treatment You're mixing different products and people here. That may be true of Google Analytics data (I don't know either way), but it's not true for their advertising services. Google purposely tracks individual pe…

is that not amazon sending cookies?

http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=5160028011

i don't how that is google tracking you individually. can you please elaborate?

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#173

Post by Joky »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #95
threeseed wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2wzmmr/everythin... Apple is using third parties to help make Siri better not to make money. And let's be clear we don't know the contract between Apple and these companies. Given Apple's track record it should have numerous privacy conditions.

>Given Apple's track record Well Apple collaborate with the NSA, so that immediately disqualifies them from giving the slightest shit about privacy.

What's the alternative for any company? Leaving the US?

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#174

Post by magicalist »

throwaway425 wrote: post #94
calhoun137 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that it's a valid objection. I disagree however, when you say " any company claiming to care about your privacy should not be using it." That's an easy accusation to throw around, but what is hard to is come up with a better alternative. What is your suggestion, that they should abandon all analytics, or that they should build their own, or do you not have one? Are you willing to acknowledge that GA…

>What is your suggestion, that they should abandon all analytics Ideally, yes. Or at the very least don't use Google for it. Use something like Pwiki instead. Or perhaps try actually allowing your users to decide what if any information they feel comfortable sharing with you. There are other non-profits like the Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive whose websites still somehow manage to function despite not…

uBlock blocks Piwik, self-hosted or not.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#175

Post by SilkRoadie »

devsquid wrote: post #133

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealt…

I agree, advertising is very important for the web. I think adblock is a step too far. If companies cannot generate revenue through advertising then they will need to start charging for their products which would be a negative for most people.

I would like to see Mozilla take the lead on bad advertising. Ads which cripple browser performance and page load speeds. These ads would then be automatically blocked by the browser. It would be similar to when apple decided to disallow flash on ios.

Just as apple encouraged a move away from flash, this would encourage content providers and advertising companies to create lighter, less intrusive ads.

Basically it would look at blocking ads which are known to track, ads which take a long time to serve, ads which prevent the page from loading till the page loaded (this might be difficult) and full ad overlays (again, could be difficult to identify)

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#176

Post by StavrosK »

chimeracoder wrote: post #96
kibwen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just last week I opted in to Firefox's multiprocess branch, and one of my biggest complaints is that this breaks pretty much every extension. I eagerly welcome this if it can replace Ghostery.

Out of curiosity, which extensions are broken for you? I've been running multiprocess Firefox as well, and every extension that I use regularly still works. The only exception was Vimperator, so I had to write my own extension to give Vim keybindings[0], since none of the others support e10s. I'm curious which extensions have given you trouble, since Ghostery, NoScript, and uBlock all work for me (at least for the mo…

Everything's broken for me too, I didn't realize it was the multiprocess thing, but it makes sense. Everything from Lastpass to Vimperator to Ghostery is behaving erratically.

I guess that's why pages have just decided to take four times as long to load.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#177

Post by pdkl95 »

Qantourisc wrote: post #162
pdkl95 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the shim idea is interesting, I suspect we could get a lot of privacy and working websites by hard-caching anything that even remotely looks like jquery and all the other well-known js libraries. (and do the same thing for fonts). It's trivial to implement - just ship a list of hashes for every published js library on all the popular CDNs (+ anywhere else that comes to midn), and if a HTTP request returns a fil…

Wouldn't lying be a better option to protect from finger printing ? Like: "what font's do you have" and just return a generic list ?

There isn't much to fingerprint when you cache a font or javascript library approximately forever. Of course it is a huge data leak to ever let the remote server enumerate fonts, but my ideas is attempting to accommodate the idea that interesting fonts can be used, while the only extra network traffic should be the font down load on first request.

I acknowledge that it isn't perfect. Someone who is really determined could (and will) send HTML with unique URLs for every javasscript/css/whatever, effectively making a cache useless. That takes proactive effort on their part, though, and in the meantime there is a lot of low-hanging-fruit.

For example, currently Google can track those of use that ban google-analytics at the router when we load any non-Google page that requests jquery fron Google's CDN. Limiting that to "about one" load to fill the cache would be easy and help in the short term..

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#178

Post by onewaystreet »

rossjudson wrote: post #118
bobajeff wrote: post #15

I would love for Mozilla to find other means of funding online content besides advertising. In either case I'd love to see them take a hard stance on privacy and against tracking. They should block trackers that have no effect on website features and restrict and monitor the ones that do effect features. ...and this is another reason Mozilla needs to have their own search engine. They could have much greater influenc…

What is this "content" you speak of, that must be funded through advertising? I checked the internet, and have been able to find very little worthwhile ad-supported content.

What content do you consume that isn't funded through advertising? Unless you don't read any blogs, news websites, use any free services etc.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#179

Post by manigandham »

Qantourisc wrote: post #164
manigandham wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but people whine when they see ads that are not to their interests either. there is no way to win.

There is: a browser switch/standard: "ask ad-providers to personalize ads" / "use generic ads". Getting anyone to honour that is going to be a big problem though. So we have to implement that on the client side, by privacy protecting measures. (Not sure how at the moment.)

There is also something that keeps being lost in this: identity and tracking are different things. Opt-out is a preference setting of an identity, and networks store this preference just like they store history and interests. By disabling 3rd party cookies and scripts, it disables the saving of any opt-out status as well, which btw, is actually mandated by certain laws and regulations so it's not all wild west here.

For anyone who wants an opt-out, here it is: http://www.youradchoices.com/

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#180

Post by sgift »

mike_hearn wrote: post #171
oconnore wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

Poor people aren't robots. They can and do see adverts for things that they don't then buy. Additionally ad targeting means they might see adverts for things they could afford and that's t be relevant to their life instead of things meant for rich westerners. The whole mental confusion between advertising and privacy in the technical and media community is really irritating. What's the alternative to advertising? Dir…

> Poor people aren't robots. They can and do see adverts for things that they don't then buy.

Ah, the grand delusion of advertisers put out again. Sure, people aren't robots, but if ads couldn't influence their behaviour no one would pay for them and there wouldn't be any.

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